by Meredith Tax
•forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of villagers upon the demolition of their homes, their release from jail or return from exile; these civilians were trucked into areas of Kurdistan far from their homes and dumped there by the army with only minimal governmental compensation or none at all for their destroyed property, or any provision for relief, housing, clothing or food, and forbidden to return to their villages of origin on pain of death. In these conditions, many died within a year of their forced displacement;
•destruction of the rural Kurdish economy and infrastructure.8
Masses of Kurdish refugees poured across the borders of Iraq into Iran and Turkey. But despite extensive press coverage of the crisis, appeals by the Kurds, and documentation of genocide by human rights organizations, absolutely nothing was done by the West either to stop the attacks or to punish the Iraqi government for its human rights violations. Everyone, including the US, was too worried about Iran becoming dominant in the region, not to mention eager to sell arms to Saddam Hussein after the war.9
Saddam drew the lesson that he could get away with war crimes. The Iran-Iraq war had ended with no gains for either side, only huge losses, and, betting his shirt on winning, he had borrowed $14 billion from Kuwait to finance his troops. Now oil prices were falling and he did not want to pay the money back. He had gotten away with murder before; why shouldn’t he now? As Saddam’s onetime employee Said Aburish described the situation, “All of a sudden he was sitting on top of a million-man tested army, unconventional weapons and he was broke, and restless. He became dangerous. He had to do something in order to survive.”10
In August 1990, he invaded Kuwait and easily overran it. The royal family and half the population fled and Iraq installed a puppet government. The invasion was universally condemned, leading the UN to impose sanctions and demand that Saddam leave Kuwait. When he didn’t, the US and others formed a UN-backed coalition and invaded Iraq in January 1991.
The Kurds had been holding their collective breath, waiting to see what would happen. Both the KDP and the PUK had moved their bases to Iran after the Anfal, waging a low-level guerrilla war against the Iraqi government, hitting and running, but not attempting to hold territory for fear of another chemical attack. Now, as Coalition forces advanced, Saddam warned the Kurds to stay out of it. To further discourage their participation, Turkey, a Coalition member, vowed that no autonomous Kurdish entity would be allowed to emerge in Iraq.
But other Coalition members were singing a different song. In February 1991, President George Bush broadcast a message over Voice of America, saying “there’s another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.”11 This certainly sounded like an invitation, particularly since the message was broadcast in both Arabic and Kurdish. Still the KDP and PUK waited, too afraid of a new Anfal to revolt again.
The Shia in southern Iraq beat them to it, rising up against Saddam’s government the minute Coalition forces defeated the Iraqi Army, in February 1991. Then a popular uprising exploded in Kurdistan, organized by the jash, of all people. They suddenly decided they were not going to support Baghdad any longer and told local Iraqi army commanders to withdraw their troops from Kurdistan. As David McDowall put it, “The majority of jash leaders were thus transformed from embarrassed collaborators with Baghdad into champions of the uprising.” In return for their support, the KDP and PUK promised them amnesty for their previous collaboration with Saddam, and the jash rushed to join both parties’ peshmerga. Kurdish forces expanded from 11,000 to over 100,000 in just a few days. Thus strengthened, the united Kurdish force advanced on Kirkuk, long the desired capital of a future Kurdish state.12
Saddam Hussein was not ready to give up Kirkuk’s oil. As the threat to Kirkuk increased, he took five thousand women and children hostage. Rushing his most high tech weapons and best troops to the area in March 1991, he forced the Kurds from Kirkuk, then from Erbil and other towns. Soon atrocity stories began to spread. Human Rights Watch reported, “In their attempts to retake cities, and after consolidating control, loyalist forces killed thousands of unarmed civilians by firing indiscriminately into residential areas; executing young people on the streets, in homes and in hospitals; rounding up suspects, especially young men, during house-to-house searches, and arresting them without charge or shooting them en masse; and using helicopters to attack unarmed civilians as they fled the cities.”13
Panic seized the Kurds; over a million and a half stampeded to the borders, trying to get to safety in Turkey or Iran. It was winter in the mountains and bitterly cold. Iran set up refugee camps on its side of the Iraq border, but Turkish soldiers used their rifle butts to beat back refugees, even invalids and mothers with babies. The Bush administration did nothing. As The Independent said scornfully, “The man who reportedly told the CIA in January to provoke the Kurds into insurrection and preached rebellion during the Gulf War, now acts like someone with a nasty bout of amnesia.”14
Turkey’s behavior was a major embarrassment for the Coalition, especially since Turkey was being considered for membership in the European Union at the time. Finally, under international pressure to do something, the Coalition announced a safe haven inside Iraq, including a no-fly zone, and pledged to keep Iraqi planes from flying above the 36th parallel. A green line was established around Iraqi Kurdistan, giving the Kurds control of Suleimaniya, Erbil, and Dohuk but not Kirkuk—the US feared that, if the Kurds had access to that much oil, they would become economically self-sufficient and secede from Iraq. Keeping Iraq in one piece has been a consistent point of State Department policy.15
Iraqi Kurdistan was now more or less free of Saddam, more or less at peace. But it would continue to suffer from what Kurdish writer Choman Hardi called “a legacy of violence.”
Armed Struggle in Turkey: 1984–1990
In 1980, the Turkish military once again overthrew the government. Turkish journalist Ismet G. Imset described the outcome: “By the morning of September 12, 1980, when tanks moved into [the] capital, Ankara, and a nation-wide curfew was imposed by the junta, Turkey’s martial law-based system had already banned most legal left-wing, radical Marxist activities as well as propaganda and had jailed thousands of Turks under the US-indoctrinated concept of ‘preventing the spread of Communism.’ Hundreds of Turks and Kurds were facing systematic torture sessions throughout the country. . . . the very fact that a group of generals, using their force and weaponry had ousted an elected civilian regime and abolished the country’s constitution, spoke for itself in [the] way of legitimacy for any form of resistance. The generals had taken over the country, closing down parliament, banning all political parties and placing their leaders, including the prime minister, under ‘protective custody.’”
According to Imset, during the period of the coup, 650,000 people were arrested and most were tortured; 500 died as a result; and 85,000 were put on trial for thought crimes or because of guilt by association. “114 thousand books were seized and burned,” Imset also reported. “937 films were banned; 2,729 writers, translators, journalists and actors were put on trial for expressing their opinions. One can hardly argue, as we enter the 21st century, that such a regime had any legitimacy other than to conform with the financial and political expectations of its foreign supporters.”16
In 1983, after three years of this, the Turkish military allowed the country to return to civilian rule, convinced they had either killed, jailed, or driven into exile all the radicals, and destroyed the Kurdish liberation movement. They could not have been more wrong.17
The PKK’s Second Congress took place in August 1982, before the end of the military dictatorship and in the middle of the Iran-Iraq war, at a Palestinian camp on the border of Jordan and Syria. By then about 300 guerrillas had been trained by the Palestinians and others. The party decided on a strategy of armed propaganda.18 While they did not have a large enough force to
seriously threaten the Turkish army, military victory was not the point of armed propaganda, as Che Guevara said in his message to the Tricontinental Conference, a meeting of revolutionary movements in Havana in 1967. The point was to inspire the peasants: “We shall follow the perennial example of the guerrilla, carrying out armed propaganda (in the Vietnamese sense, that is, the bullets of propaganda, of the battles won or lost — but fought — against the enemy). The great lesson of the invincibility of the guerrillas taking root in the dispossessed masses. The galvanizing of the national spirit, the preparation for harder tasks, for resisting even more violent repressions.”19 In other words, survival itself would be a victory. Or, as Henry Kissinger once put it, “the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win.”20
The KDP agreed to let the PKK set up bases in the Qandil Mountains of Iraq, where they built their main camp in Lolan, a border area between Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. Then the PKK began to call in its cadres, who had to cross the border by foot. Over the next two years, PKK guerrillas went back and forth from Turkey in small groups of three to five, reconnoitering and mapping, figuring out where Turkish troops were concentrated and finding places to hide.21
On August 15, 1984, they staged their first two armed propaganda actions. In the early evening, thirty guerrillas entered Eruh, a mountain town of about 4,000, and opened fire on its military barracks, killing a soldier. While some PKK members guarded the barracks to make sure none of the soldiers got out, others occupied the mosque, using its loudspeakers to announce themselves to the town. Still others distributed leaflets in the coffee shops in the main street, saying this was the beginning of the Kurdish liberation war. When it became clear the soldiers were not going to do anything, the PKK raided another building for weapons, then left in a truck belonging to the Turkish water administration.
They used similar tactics in Semdinli, an even smaller mountain town: Eighteen cadre swept in, firing warning shots; then, while some guarded the officers’ club and barracks, others went to the city square and read a prepared statement saying they had formed a liberation army and the war was about to start. Sari Baran, the commander of the attack, later explained, “Our goal really wasn’t to kill a lot of soldiers. The attack was more to gain people’s support and get them to join us. . . . We wanted to make an attack that would give people trust in us.”
The PKK conducted other actions that month, killing three soldiers accompanying a presidential tour, and eight more near the Iraqi border. The Turkish military couldn’t seem to find them, and young men from the villages started joining up. Over the course of 1984, Baran’s team went from eighteen to fifty.22
In PKK historiography, according to social scientists Ahmet Hamdi Akkaya and Joost Jongerden, the two August 15 actions marked a turning point, a “day of awakening. It is believed that through the dual attack, which marked the start of the armed struggle, the chains of submission and assimilation were broken and Kurds rediscovered themselves.” Prior to August 15, the story goes, Kurds were ashamed of their Kurdishness, and were forgetting their culture and language. The first shot fired on 15 August thus hit two enemies—Turkish colonialism and Kurdish self-hatred—with one bullet. This echoes Sartre’s argument in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, a romanticization of the curative powers of violence, which is a common theme in revolutionary literature of the sixties and seventies. Martin van Bruinessen refers to the PKK’s “almost religious belief in violence as a means of salvation” in this period.23
But soon the Turkish military began to catch up with the PKK. Winter in the mountains is very hard. The guerrillas were inexperienced, outnumbered, and outgunned. A number were captured and sent to prison. Some talked under torture and gave up the names and locations of others. Turkey poured troops into the region: Five divisions were stationed in the southeast, military installations were beefed up, and new outposts were established near areas where the PKK relied on villages for food and intelligence.24
Then, following the model of the Iraqi jash, Turkey began to develop an army of locally based Kurdish irregulars to fight the PKK, a system of village guards. As in Iraq, the plan re-inscribed tribalism on the Kurds. Village guards were paid so well—the equivalent of $70 a month—that 13,000 men enlisted before the end of 1985. As van Bruinessen described the system, “Village guards (korucu) received arms and attractive payment, in exchange for which they were expected to hunt down any PKK partisans coming near their villages (and later, to take part in anti-PKK operations further away as well). They received a bounty for each killed guerrilla, and soon there were reports that for the sake of bounty or private revenge many people were killed who had no relation to the PKK but were posthumously declared guerrillas. The village guard system reinforced the old tribal structures that had been gradually loosening during the preceding half century, and brought back some of the worst features of traditional Kurdish society. . . . Moreover amnesty was offered to criminals who joined the village guard system; the effect was that former bandits henceforth could with impunity harass their neighbours in the name of the struggle against the PKK.”25
Faced with these new enemies, the PKK found it impossible to expand, though it managed to hold onto the bases it already had. But this was not good enough for Ocalan, who had no military experience himself—he later said he had never shot a gun in his life—and tended to overestimate what was possible. If the PKK wasn’t winning, that had to mean people were not trying hard enough, or their commanders were making mistakes or were ideologically unsound. Over the next two years, the cadre who had planned and led the August 15 actions were targeted for internal discipline, made to look ridiculous or incompetent, or even arrested by their comrades.26
The PKK held its Third Congress in October 1986. Historians speak of this congress as the one where Ocalan consolidated his power, establishing a cult of personality that could not be questioned. Cemil Bayak, a founder of the PKK who later became head of the Association of Communities in Kurdistan (KCK), called it “the congress at which internal accounts were settled.”27 A practice had already begun of executing people who were considered disruptive, on the theory that they were police agents or working against the party in some way.
Cetin Gungor (party name Semir) had dared to question the plan to begin the armed struggle at the Second Congress; he was threatened and fled to Sweden, where he was assassinated. At least eleven other high level cadre were killed between 1983 and 1985, gunned down in Europe or at the PKK’s camp in northern Iraq.28
The Third Congress made other serious decisions: In order to strengthen their numbers and treasury, the party decided the PKK should start forcibly conscripting peasants and make them pay taxes as well.29 They addressed the need for training by setting up the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy, named after the first commander of the PKK militia forces, who had been killed by the Turks. The Academy was a three-week immersion program held every year at the PKK camp in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley.
Because there were so many new recruits, the need for training was acute. Peasants were joining from villages in the southeast, and, increasingly, students were joining from cities in western Turkey, where probably half of the country’s Kurdish population lived by then. There were even recruits from Europe, where the PKK was actively organizing among Kurdish exiles. Most of those who joined, according to van Bruinessen, were “drawn almost exclusively from the lowest social classes—the uprooted, half-educated village and small-town youth who knew what it felt like to be oppressed, and who wanted action, not ideological sophistication.”30
The curriculum of the Mahsum Korkmaz Academy combined military and ideological training, the latter often conducted by Ocalan himself. His lectures normally lasted four to seven hours, extempore and with no breaks. The emphasis of the training course was to help young recruits mobilize their own idealism to become different people, “new men” and “free women” who would cast aside the feudal or bourgeois ways of thinking of their forme
r lives, and be reborn as revolutionaries. Much of the work consisted of self-criticism, oral and written, with input from both classmates and teachers and frequent reminders that “90% of the combat is against your old personality, the enemy within, and only 10% against the external enemy.”31
As social scientist Hamit Bozarslan noted, this “really is Franz Fanon speaking: The responsibility for slavery lies also with the slave himself and it is only his resistance that will allow him to become a free man. Violence is the main key to reach this goal. So it is not only about changing the system but about creating a man who frees himself from his chains.”32
The many new recruits who were students brought with them habits of questioning authority and wanting to know the reasons for decisions. But PKK culture could not easily assimilate people who asked questions. Ocalan was suspicious that police agents might incite division and ordered the head of the Academy to scrutinize new recruits for traits that might mean they were actual or potential police agents or traitors.33
Two years after the founding of the Academy, Martin van Bruinessen wrote, “Paranoia seems quite rampant among the members of the PKK. They see enemies and traitors everywhere, which is one reason for their violent tendencies. Other factors are the social backgrounds of most members and their youth. About half of the approximately 250 ‘martyrs’ the PKK claims were below the age of 22 when they were killed, and almost all were described as of very humble origins. These are precisely the groups most susceptible to rigorous indoctrination and most receptive to the party’s romantic doctrine of revenge.”34
French sociologist Olivier Grojean, who interviewed nearly forty members and ex-members of the PKK and its network in Europe about their training, painted a picture of an education process designed to break down individual personality structures, push recruits to cut ties with their families, and agree to sacrifice their personal lives so they could devote themselves totally to the needs of the revolution. Punishment was severe for those who did not measure up.